ProtonMail

The past couple of years I have been very interested in encrypted email and other encrypted communication methods. This is primarily after learning how wide open the protocols we primarily use are to interception and abuse. Email is a big one where private and personal information is passed around the globe in a format that can be read and intercepted easily. Read more of my thoughts on why email encryption is important. PGP encrypting email is the surest way to use email more securely. However, others need to use it as well. PGP encryption is not considered a simple process for most people so people just don’t use it.

I have been following a company based in Switzerland called ProtonMail that has been working on an encrypted email solution that uses PGP encryption rather than some “in-house” encryption solution. This company has also made a portion of their work open source so others can audit their work. It should be noted that the backend of their system is not open source which is not ideal when overall trust of a system is of importance. However, I recognize that what ProtonMail is doing overall is a positive move for more users to adopt secure email as an option while using an open standard like PGP. All other systems I have looked at are completely closed in that they have implemented their own encryption system that requires all encrypted communication to be done through their service. I have had an account with ProtonMail since near when they started in Beta a couple years ago.

On January 26th ProtonMail will be opening up to everyone and moving out of Beta. This means anyone will be able to get a ProtonMail account and easily send encrypted emails and receive PGP encrypted emails. In fact you can reserve your account name now if you want. January 26th is also is when the iOS and Android apps will be made available to everyone, and users will be able to use their own domain names with the service as well. This is huge as PGP encryption can be a hurdle for people as it is, and even more so when mobile solutions are considered. One caveat with ProtonMail currently is that using your own PGP key is not yet available nor is sending traditional PGP encrypted emails to addresses outside of ProtonMail. Once these two items are completed I am likely going to move to ProtonMail as my primary email. Currently an encrypted email to an external user utilizes the ProtonMail servers and an agreed on password between recipients which is a bit awkward but certainly gets the job done when communicating to users who are not using encrypted email. The good news is ProtonMail revealed their roadmap and full PGP implementation is coming in 2016 so encrypted emails will be sendable to users who use PGP outside of ProtonMail. I anticipate that by mid 2016 or early 2017 that ProtonMail will have in place all of the pieces for me to use them as my primary email and also be an email service that I can recommend to friends and family for encrypted email.

Feel free to send me an email at hc.liamnotorpnull@wotsirbffej if you would like to discuss email encryption. You can grab my PGP public key below and send me an encrypted message as well if you are using PGP. I also welcome messages from my PGP encrypted form from my website if you want to send an encrypted email but really have no idea how to go about doing that.